Another blatant lie
By Henry Lamb
web posted July 15, 2002
There are two schools of thought about lying. One school
teaches that if you get caught in a lie, you lose credibility and no
one will believe you in the future. The other school teaches that if
your lie is big enough, and repeated often enough, sooner or
later, people will begin to believe you.
Environmental extremists studied in the second school of lying.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich scared the wits out of my generation with
his book, "Population Bomb," which proclaimed that Americans
would be dying in the streets of starvation by the mid 1980s.
Then, in the 1970s, came the rash of so-called "scientific" articles
about the coming ice-age, caused by human use of fossil fuels.
By the late 1980s, the scare proclaimed by these same experts
was the inevitable global warming - caused by human use of
fossil fuels.
Malaria is killing millions of people today, because these
extremists told a whopper about DDT, which led to its needless
ban.
Then came the Alar scare, the apple preservative that the
Natural Resources Defense Council used to devastate the apply
industry, by getting CBS to air their flawed report that alar posed
a serious cancer risk to children.
Lester Brown, and his Worldwatch Institute, continue to
produce an annual "State of the World" report, filled with gloom-
and-doom prophecies that completely ignore the facts that
disprove most of its claims.
Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund teamed up in the
1990s with an especially insidious scheme to scare people:
chlorine causes the penis to shrivel. Louis J. Guillette, Jr., of the
University of Florida, told a Congressional committee: "every
man in this room is half the man his grandfather was," because of
the use of chlorine.
This is all nonsense, of course, designed to scare people into
contributing to the organizations that can apply the political
pressure necessary to fix the exaggerated, or imaginary,
problem.
The World Wildlife Fund is at it again. Under the headline
(http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html)
"Earth will Expire in 2050," England's Guardian
reports on a new WWF study, which claims that "Western
society's high consumption levels" will require two more earth-
size planets by 2050.
The report claims that "more than a third of the natural world has
been destroyed by humans over the past three decades."
According to Wendell Cox, a visiting Fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, only 2.6 percent of the land area in the United
States is developed, and in the past 50 years, for every acre
developed, 1.5 acres have been set aside as parks and open
space.
The WWF report says we must dramatically reduce our
consumption, or colonize another planet.
Now there's a great idea - a problem-solving idea, which should
be led by WWF, Greenpeace, EarthFirst!, and all the other
enviro-extremist organizations.
They should colonize a new planet, and take all the students in
the second school of lying with them. Just think of the immediate
benefit to the earth from the reduction of hot-air emissions. All
their SUVs could be parked. No longer would they have to
worry about meeting their multi-million dollar budgets to maintain
their luxurious Washington headquarters.
And they could shape their new world exactly the way they want
it to be.
Of course, they'll need to take some loggers, to cut the trees to
make their toilet paper. They'll need to take some miners, to get
the minerals to make the machinery to make their toilet paper,
windmills, solar panels, and bicycles. They won't need any
ranchers; they are likely to be vegans. They won't need any
farmers; they'll have plenty of time to work their own organic
gardens.
As concerned as these environmental extremists seem to be
about over-population, and the health of the earth, surely, they
will see that their absence will be a great blessing to the earth,
and a true act of patriotism.
Since we're not likely to see such an act of patriotism from the
green extremists, we can only ignore their periodic ranting, throw
their solicitation envelopes in the garbage, and urge our elected
officials to stop giving our tax money to these groups. The World
Wildlife Fund has taken more than $73 million of your tax dollars
since 1997 - to tell you that you're eating too much, and living
too high on the hog, and that it's killing the planet.
It's bad enough that these people study at the second school of
lying; there's absolutely no reason why we should have to pay
their tuition.
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental
Conservation Organization, and chairman of Sovereignty
International.
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